The web is going through a slow-motion identity crisis.

It began as a decentralized space of pages, links, and pure human curiosity. Then came the rise of centralized platforms that promised convenience… and, quietly, rewrote the rules.

And now, in 2025, we have entered a completely new chapter: a web where artificial intelligence not only stores or transmits information, but also... generates.

In the beginning, the web was glorious chaos. Anyone could set up a site, link it to another, and voilà: information flowed like wine at a 2003 tech meetup.
Without guardians.
No paywalls.
Without “sign in with Google”.

She was deliciously ugly, anarchic, and free.

But then came the platforms. The aggregators. The economy of “connect your friends” and “check your likes.” And suddenly, the decentralized garden was paved with social feeds, logins, and frictionless surveillance.

Centralization: The cult of convenience

Let's be clear: centralization won. At least for now.

Google decides what you see.
Meta decides what you feel.
Amazon decides what you buy.
Apple decides what you can download.
And OpenAI… well, here I am, so you tell me.

There are plenty of reasons why this happened:

• It's easier. One login. One interface. One account to rule them all.

• It's more secure (supposedly). Big Tech has better security than your cousin's home server.

• Scale. Nobody wants to wait 12 seconds for an IPFS handshake when they can click on a YouTube thumbnail and receive an ad in milliseconds.

The result? The modern web is like living in a shopping mall: everything is polished, predictable, and under surveillance. And you can't change the music.

Gradually, convenience prevailed. Platforms emerged to solve problems: discovery, scalability, identity, content management.
Google made things searchable.
Facebook made them social.
YouTube made them playable.
Amazon made them available for purchase.

Each of these platforms started as a service. But they ended up as monopolies. Not because they were evil (at least not initially), but because centralization is efficient. It's easier to scale one large platform than a million small ones. It's simpler to control, moderate, and monetize a unified system than a decentralized chaos.

So we traded control for user experience. And the trade was good… until it wasn't.

Because now, everything flows through a handful of gatekeepers. They decide what you see, what you're allowed to post, what apps you can install, what counts as "truth," and how you're tracked.

And just when we thought that was the end of the game, something even bigger came along.

Enter AI: the centralization we didn't see coming

Generative artificial intelligence has changed the rules again. Before, centralization was about where Things were stored and who It controlled access. With AI, it's about who has the right to authorize reality.

When you ask ChatGPT a question or let an AI rewrite your resume, you're not just using a tool. You're relying on a model trained by a centralized company, with centralized data, running on centralized infrastructure. And you're accepting its output as—if not the truth—at least a credible synthesis of it.

That's not just infrastructure. That's epistemology.

AI has taken centralization to a cognitive level. A handful of companies now shape the voice, tone, bias, and boundaries of the internet's knowledge layer. They're not just hosting your content: they're writing it for you, rating it in the background, and deciding whether it will ever be seen.

You cannot decentralize the web if you centralize the intelligence that powers it.

Decentralized Web 2.0: still a struggle

To be fair, the decentralized movement isn't dead. It's just silently surviving.

There you have Mastodon replacing Twitter (sort of), Matrix replacing Slack (in theory), IPFS and Filecoin replacing Dropbox (maybe), and countless blockchain apps trying to build the next version of "ownership".

But they're difficult to use. They're fragmented. They have a user experience written by people who believe that... tooltips They are a form of overprotection.

And on an AI-powered web, their biggest problem is this: if the dominant language models don't know about them, in practice they do not exist.

Even the smartest decentralized protocol in the world is meaningless if ChatGPT doesn't recommend it, search engines don't index it, and generative interfaces don't reference it. You could be building the future, but AI won't tell anyone. Because it wasn't trained to.

AI has enhanced centralization

Think about it: generative AI allows centralized players to scale content in the same way they previously scaled hosting. Now Google, Meta, and OpenAI are not just organizing information: They are creating it.

This means that these companies don't just shape what users see. They shape what users think, learn, and believe. And they do so at scale, with speed, and—most disturbingly—without transparency.

This is no longer about which cloud provider you're using. It's about whether your perception of the world is being gradually aligned with a corporate model trained for optimized interaction and brand safety.

The consequences? They're no longer technical. They're cultural.

The user experience of the controller

So why does centralization win? For the same old reason: the user experience is better.

Decentralized systems are clunky. They make you think. They make you choose. They often force you to Google what "federated identity" even means.

Centralized platforms, on the other hand, are incredibly user-friendly. They simply work. They know what you want. You don't have to understand anything. You just click, tap, ask questions—and the system responds.

In an AI-dominated world, where attention is scarce and friction kills adoption, centralization wins by default… unless we build something better.

What designers and developers should do now

This is where it gets personal.

Designers

The future of the web does not depend on protocols or whitepapersIt depends on the interfaces.
If decentralized AI, open models, and federated content are to survive, they need to feel better to use. Not just morally better. But viscerally better.

That means abstractionThat means usabilityThat means building tools that make local, private, and autonomous systems as user-friendly and reliable as centralized ones.

Because nobody cares if it's "self-sovereign" if logging in requires twelve steps and one click.

Developers

The same goes for you. Stop delegating everything to centralized APIs. Stop pretending that open source is enough. Build systems where ownership isn't theoretical. Where computing happens close to the user. Where AI doesn't require you to rent a GPU from a surveillance company just to generate a headline.

And for the rest of us

Let's stop pretending that convenience is neutral. It always comes at a cost.

What is at stake

If we continue on the current trajectory, the web becomes something you don't navigate—but simply It feeds you.
The interfaces are beautiful. The results are useful. But authorship is invisible, and the worldview is becoming increasingly homogeneous.

You'll still have a voice. Technically. But good luck trying to make yourself heard in an AI-curated world that favors the average, the plausible, and the monetizable.

The decentralized web doesn't need to be perfect. But it does need to be possible. Because otherwise, we're no longer just centralizing the infrastructure. We're centralizing the thought.

We are no longer just users. We are inputsAnd we must decide—before it's too late—if we want to be something more than that.

The battle between centralization and decentralization is no longer about where we store our data. It's about who shapes our mindsIn the age of AI, that's not a technical problem. It's a human problem.

Original article by Noah Davis | September 11, 2025 | Published in webdesignerdepot